Coaches’ Verbal Instructions and Skilled Adolescent Judo Players’ Attentional Strategies During Training and Competition

Focus of attention instructions and verbal feedbacks that coaches provide to athletes during practice, and how these instructions and feedbacks affect athletes’ focus of attention during competition has rarely been investigated. The aim of this study was to investigate the abovementioned issue in the combat sport of judo using adolescents who were invited to national judo team camp. Twenty-five adolescents participated in this study. Participants were asked to complete a questionnaire about their coaches’ attentional instructions and verbal feedback during practice, and the judo players reported their focus of attention during competition. The questionnaire was adopted from the previous studies, and included multi-choice and open-ended questions. The majority of participants reported that during practice, their coaches provided equal internal and external focus of attention instructions, and equal knowledge of performance (KP) and knowledge of results (KR) feedback. Further, our results indicated that during most phases of competition the most prevalent theme that participants focused on was “winning and strategy.” However, in the execution phase of skill performance, the most prevalent theme was what was categorized as “clear mind” It seems that during the execution phase, adolescent national-level judo players do not adopt any focus or at least are unaware of their thoughts explicitly.